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Feb 15, 2009 06:10 PM | 7
Editor's Note: This post is also appearing at the American Institute for Biological Sciences' Year of Science 2009: Celebrate Evolution. For more, see our tribute to Darwin on his 200th birthday.
February 12, 2009, marked the 200th birthday of two giants of the 19th century: Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. But the two great men are linked by something other than the simultaneity of their births.
Before we get to the details of that linkage, let me introduce a third larger-than-life character: Ernst Mayr. In 2000, I had the unique privilege of working with one of the foremost evolutionary biologists of the 20th century, Ernst Mayr, on an essay he wrote for that year’s July issue of Scientific American, titled “Darwin’s Influence on Modern Thought.”
Mayr, 95 years old at the time, still published regularly—he would write two more books before his death at 100—and had a wry sense of humor. When I told him that my favorite work of his was One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought, because it was so straightforward, he replied, “Do you know that my books are so straightforward that the New York Review of Books has never reviewed one?”
Here is a key section of Mayr’s Scientific American article:
“Darwin refutes typology. From the time of the Pythagoreans and Plato, the general concept of the diversity of the world emphasized its invariance and stability. This viewpoint is called typology, or essentialism. The seeming variety, it was said, consisted of a limited number of natural kinds (essences or types), each one forming a class. The members of each class were thought to be identical, constant, and sharply separated from the members of other essences.
“Variation, in contrast, is nonessential and accidental. A triangle illustrates essentialism: all triangles have the same fundamental characteristics and are sharply delimited against quadrangles or any other geometric figures. An intermediate between a triangle and a quadrangle is inconceivable. Typological thinking, therefore, is unable to accommodate variation and gives rise to a misleading conception of human races. For the typologist, Caucasians, Africans, Asians or Inuits are types that conspicuously differ from other human ethnic groups. This mode of thinking leads to racism. (Although the ignorant misapplication of evolutionary theory known as “social Darwinism” often gets blamed for justifications of racism, adherence to the disproved essentialism preceding Darwin in fact can lead to a racist viewpoint.)
“Darwin completely rejected typological thinking and introduced instead the entirely different concept now called population thinking. All groupings of living organisms, including humanity, are populations that consist of uniquely different individuals. No two of the six billion humans are the same. Populations vary not by their essences but only by mean statistical differences. By rejecting the constancy of populations, Darwin helped to introduce history into scientific thinking and to promote a distinctly new approach to explanatory interpretation in science.”
At the time of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, however, the legal status of African Americans in the soon-to-be-torn-asunder United States reflected a deeply typological viewpoint. The Constitution had institutionalized this thinking mathematically: it considered slaves to be three-fifths of a full human being.
Just over three years later, however, Lincoln swept such typological calculation away. The Emancipation Proclamation, followed by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, recognized in law what Darwin had made scientific: that all people were equally human, their individual characteristics just variations on the theme of humanity.
Lincoln at his last photographic sitting, 1865, via Wikimedia
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7 Comments
Add CommentThe last 2 paragraphs are misleading; the southern states wanted to include slaves in the population count and the northern states did not want to count them at all. The compromise of 3/5 was agreed upon to placate both sides.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlthough I am now officially a senior citizen I am a latecomer to the debate over human evolution. However I attribute my late enter to my recent retirement, and my new found internet-skills; ironically both forms of personal evolution. From time to time I submit a comment on articles which interest me. My intention is to participate in, not pontificate over, them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSince I started following the evolution debate I have found it to be severely charged with emotional bias. Many participants are so deeply entrenched in their point of view they don't discuss they argue. They dont debate they denigrate. They pound each other with nasty epithets like cavemen swing clubs. I have found the creationist severely out numbered and bullied by the evolutionists. It makes me wonder; could we all possibly have evolved from the same pro generation?
More than one interesting contrast faces us with the simultaneous birthday celebrations of Darwin and Lincoln. One contrast is the origin of man. One believed man to be the quintessential by product of evolution; the other believed him to be the quintessential creation of a Devine Being.
Another contrast is how these paragons would be debating the subject were they facing each other today. Both men were deeply rooted in their beliefs, but both men believed in civility, not acrimony; and that is a lesson we can all build on today.
Creationists are hardly outnumbered. Every poll taken recently indicates that subscribers to the theory of evolution/natural selection are heavily out-numbered by those of other viewpoints. The last figure I read/ or saw on TV was 39% for the evolutionists.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThanks for admitting me. How frequently do I have to blog to stay on here?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIncredible that racism remains so vibrant in the news with inferential assassination and stereotyping an allure of the watermelon to skin pigmentation while the halls of pedagogy continue to debate the mythology of a six thousand year old Earth via standardized testing instruments to rationalize our intelligence and existence?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScience Blindness To Gene's Lifehood
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA. From "Better sensing through empty receptors"
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/47817/title/Better_sensing_through_empty_receptors
A new model suggests cells may be more sensitive to their environment than previously thought.
This work deals with the mechanism and efficiency of some components of the sensing system on a monocell organism's outer membrane. It refers to
- cells may benefit...
- how a cell sorts information...
- single-celled organisms, such as bacteria and yeast, must accurately judge their landscape to find food and avoid trouble.
B. From "Bacterium With Chemoreceptors Versus Multicelled Organisms"
http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/200/122.page#3489
From sensing to signalling to tumbling to re-swimming. This goes on in a bacterial cell. Who and how assesses the information and draws and issues instructions?
C. 21st Century Science Is Still Blind To Gene's Lifehood
This blindness is one of the hallmarks of the scientifically decadent corrupt still ongoing 20th century technology culture.
D. Cells are just the functional housings of the organisms genes-genome
Nature evolved genes to constrain energy as long as possible and to replicate for augmenting the amount of constrained energy.
Genes evolved the capability and technique first to adapt and later to manipulate their environments by means of their expressions. Their expressions handle everything for the genes, from sensing to remembering to signaling through foraging through all components of surviving. Each and all of their expressions are targeted for augmented constrained energy survival.
Is this so difficult to notice and accept scientifically?
It seems that mundane scientific decadence blinds 21st century science to the lifehood of genes.
Dov Henis
(Comments From The 22nd Century)
Updated Life's Manifest May 2009
http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/140/122.page#2321
Implications Of E=Total[m(1 + D)]
http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/180/122.page#3108
Not Just Genes Lifehood
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe scope of the issue is not just the lifehood of genes.
I suggest and urge looking up the two succinct refs. They are the basis of a unified field theory covering the universe big bang inflation-gravity-expansion-E/m transformations-impansion back to E/m superposition.
Dov Henis
(Comments From The 22nd Century)
Updated Life's Manifest May 2009
http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/140/122.page#2321
Implications Of E=Total[m(1 + D)]
http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/180/122.page#3108